Were CNN’s ‘Vile Insults of China’ A ‘Mistake By U.S. Authorities?’
Does a dictatorship that has outlawed freedom of the press have the standing to criticize the ‘journalistic ethics’ of American reporters? That is the question one must grapple with when reading through Beijing’s latest blistering attack against CNN host Jack Cafferty ‘and his ilk’ for referring to the Chinese regime as ‘goons and thugs’ and calling Chinese goods ‘junk.’ Paradoxically, now the Chinese authorities appear to be criticizing Washington for doing exactly what the Beijing regime does as a matter of policy every day – violate the independence of the Fourth Estate.
According to this editorial from China’s tightly-controlled People’s Daily:
“People in journalism should abide by professional ethics. CNN’s recent reporting is diametrically opposed to the principles of objectivity and balance so often cited as the standard for news coverage. … One has to wonder if his slip-up was the result of a mistake by American authorities or if it just shows that Cafferty and his ilk remain blind and ignorant to both history and reality.”
EDITORIAL
April 17, 2008
People’s Republic of China – People’s Daily – Original Article (English)
After its manipulation of riot pictures from Tibet, the Cable News Network (CNN) has again been condemned, this time for slandering China. On April 9 during a TV show [the Situation Room], host Jack Cafferty said that Chinese products are “junk” and the Chinese people are “basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years WATCH .” His malicious verbal attack on China and the Chinese people have sparked tremendous indignation within San Francisco’s Chinese community, where the Beijing Olympic torch relay was recently held. American Chinese have protesting intensely by signing online against CNN and demanding that CNN apologize for insulting Chinese people and take punitive actions against its host Jack Cafferty.
CNN is lying again. Since its cropped photo of the Lhasa riot misled public opinion in March, both at home and abroad, CNN has lost all credibility amongst the Chinese audience. “Don’t be like CNN” has become the most popular cyber chant. Not coincidentally, Cafferty has again targeted China, going even further to insult the Chinese people. What a despicable and ugly performance!
[Editor's Note: Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu rejected CNN's explanation that commentator Jack Cafferty was referring to China's leaders - not the Chinese people - when he described them as "goons and thugs." CNN said it apologized to anyone who thought otherwise WATCH . Jiang said that CNN, "turned its attack on the Chinese government to try to sow division between the Chinese government and the people."]
Why does Cafferty remain so obsessed with his baseless prejudice and discrimination against Chinese? Why does he remain true to his ignorance and resist the hard facts. After all, American Chinese have always been dubbed a model community.
Since the 1950s, the American Chinese population has been growing by leaps and bounds and at a rate that is doubling every ten years. Since 1987, the Chinese mainland has become the largest source of American Chinese [as opposed to Taiwan]. During the 1990s alone, 460,000 mainland Chinese settled in the United States. Of the total American population, 1.83 million had been born in China at the end of 2005 out of a total Chinese population of 3.3 million.
America has enjoyed almost 200-years of mainland Chinese immigration. By helping explore and tame the wild West and develop local economies, early Chinese immigrants did much to change the outlook of the vast but backward American Frontier. Their contributions are well-documented by history.
READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing foreign press coverage of the growing crisis over China’s criticism of its Western critics.
6 Responses to “Were CNN’s ‘Vile Insults of China’ A ‘Mistake By U.S. Authorities?’”
My brother is fluent in Mandarin & has traveled all over western China, which few foreigners visit—he was working for the UN org FAO as a rice pest expert and would explain how to avoid diseases affecting rice. His Australian wife accompanied him on for six months as she gathered info for an advanced degree at an Aussie U.
They wrote back that health & living conditions in these remote provinces were abysmal, abominable, and the population barely educated—even the local officials spoke poor Mandarin & had little expertise in anything except officious incompetence.
The Chinese are flooding the US with shoddy merchandise of all kinds, and a recent health epidemic in Panama was from their substituting diethylene glycol for glycerine, causing over 100 deaths in Panama alone.
My brother told me that the Chinese are intensely nationalistic and have the “Middle Kingdom attitude,” which puts China above all other countries—at least in their own consciousness. He compared it with American exceptionalism, but said that the squalor and mendacious peculation he encountered on every level of Chinese society made the comparison ridiculous, totally ludicrous.
And my brother has become an Australian citizen—not even being a big fan of the USA! He does have a PhD & speaks Bahasa Malay fluently as well, and now heads a major USAID project in Indonesia. He's glad to live there rather than the PRC.
They can say whatever they want and screw china or anyone else. This is America. It is, however, cheap tabloid journalism with little regard for accuracy or nuance. Sure we get plenty of crap goods from china, as well as Mexico, Malaysia, South America, ect. We also get may high quality items from China like Sony, Apple, IBM, ect, that sell goods produced in China. It's lazy thinking to just label a county and ignore the complexity of a situation.
[...] a land where media is controlled by state, they assume that same applies elsewhere it [...]
China's gov't is just mad because Cafferty called them on it. In American when the news sucks its because of good ole fashioned incompetence, not censorship. It must be really frustrating for them to see a reporter speaking freely against them and not be able to put him in jail.
Look at the problem exposed recently with Chinese manufacture of heparin. Here, for those who never heard about this event:
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=heparin
China simply doesn't like being criticized, be it for tyranny in Tibet (“rejoining the big family of the Motherland,” sorry), lobbing insults or missiles at Taiwan (and passing laws compelling Taiwanese to oppose independence, making any attempt to oppose reunification treason and justifying the massacre that would follow any reunification), or engaging in conflicts with its neighbors, be they from “peaceful fishing vessels” going into contested island groups, or being caught running submarines near ChineseXXXXXXXJapanese islands. (And don't forget how much land that should be India's China has helped itself to, as well as what influence China has had on the Maoists in Nepal.)
Meanwhile, the nuttier among the nuts continue to deny China is any kind of threat to anybody.
[...] The Moderate Voice wrote an interesting post today on Were Caffertyâ??s â??Vile Insults of Chinaâ?? a â??Mistake By U.S. Authorities?â??Here’s a quick excerptAfter its manipulation of riot pictures from Tibet, the Cable News Network (CNN)… [...]